Good morning, Mr President. I am addressing the contestation that has attended the enactment and assent to the 2026 Electoral Act.
Since the birth of the fourth republic, the sanctity of the thumb that bears the consent of the electorate has been persistently undermined. The election management body, which is qualified as independent, namely the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), has not been truly independent. It has presided over several electoral heists in our political annals.
In the 2007 general election, the Commonwealth Observer Group noted the manipulations in the election were uniquely Nigerian and had not been observed anywhere in the world. The judiciary, the final arbiter in the process, has itself become a victim of the governing class, in ways that underlined Karl Marx’s class definition of the state to the extent that the state is nothing other than the executive committee of the dominant class in society.
In a way, if we concede the class delineation of the population and their subaltern manifestation in ethnicity, the quest for popular control of the state comes out in bold relief. It is a contest for power, and all is fair in the game; the losers will always lament. The popular forces struggling for control of the central authorities in Nigeria think that power will be served to them on a platter. Power concedes nothing without demand. In other words, a fight is necessary.
The nature of hegemonic control of state apparatuses has been well enunciated in the Gramscian war of position. It is an approach towards social change that penetrates all social forces within civil society. The opposition needs to resort to empiricism in power politics to know what to do. Without popular input, the state loses legitimacy.
Mr President needs to tap into the wishes of the popular forces to endear them to your administration and earn the legitimacy that comes with public trust.
Back to the basics. What is electronic voting? It is the employment of electronic means in the voting process. It is to enhance the casting and counting of ballots. To put it differently, make voting more efficient. The justification is to facilitate voting, save time, and accord the exercise a degree of integrity in ways that win public trust.
It is also defined as “a system that utilizes electronic or computerized means within the voting process, such as blind signatures, commitments, homomorphic cryptography, and mix-nets, to ensure confidentiality, anonymity, and integrity of the voting process (see https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/electronic-voting-system). As a comprehensive process, e-voting enables voters to vote from home, overseas, or at a kiosk or polling station using an electronic system that may be computer-based, rendering obsolete traditional punch card or thumb-printing of ballot papers.
Some sources trace the concept of electronic voting to the late nineteenth century, when mechanical lever machines were employed, the 1960s, underlined by paper ballot scanning, and the 1970s, noted for electronic vote recording machines. It would receive a boost with the advent of internet technology in 2000. The electronic transmission of results is a direct consequence of the internet technology.
In 2005, Estonia, though a small country, conducted its election online. The long and short of it is that the world is inclining towards e-voting, including electronic transmission of results. However, an e-voting system is susceptible to cyber-attacks or software booboos, and online votes identification snags. Nevertheless, some have advocated the use of blockchain technology and algorithms to mend the drawbacks (See Victoria Masterson, What is e-voting? Who’s using it and is it safe? Apr 4, 2024 https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/04/what-is-electronic-voting/).
Fundamentally, e-voting is evolving and yet to be globalised. What we have done so far is to move along this evolving trajectory of e-voting: from Card Reader, Bimodal Voters’ Accreditation system, to electronic transmission of results.
There is the perception that electronic transmission of results is the silver bullet to restore transparency and credibility to the electoral process in Nigeria. It will, for sure, accord the process credibility, but it is by no means the only solution to our electoral problems. We have forgotten so soon the subject of process-rigging, manifest in the selection of candidates for election, the partiality of state apparatuses, and the monetization of the process.
All these hinder the emergence of quality candidates that would respect the rule of law and remain faithful to their party manifestos. The majority of the current actors in the political sphere have imbibed the “do-or-die” mentality, which in essence means that whatever law is in place, they will go to great lengths to circumvent it.
The hue and cry about the 2026 Electoral Act was whether it encompassed or not the “real-time transmission of results”. The act did not use the publicly preferred clause, but Clause 60 (3) provides for electronic transmission of election results without the “shall” but with a conditional line on “manual transmission”.
Apart from the engrossment of the electronic transfer of election results to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV with the establishment of the National Electronic Register of Election Results (Section 62(2) of the 2022 Electoral Act), the National Assembly through Senator Bamidele Opeyemi, the Senate Majority Leader, named inadequate communication and power infrastructure among the compelling factors why real-time transmission is not possible. While these reasons are a direct indictment of your administration, they have been controverted by the telecommunications service providers in the country.
The former INEC chairman, Prof Mahmud Yakubu, had once attested to the capacity of the Commission for electronic transmission of results.
The inability of his leadership to use the IReV has been mired in controversy due to “technical glitches,” but what was not popularised in the controversy is the alleged cyber-attacks by sundry interest groups, which were the main reason for the failure to transmit results electronically. For the opposition forces, IReV is no substitute for organising. As Nkrumah once said, organisation decides everything.
Mr President, all said, the stability of the state requires that actors adhere to the rules once they have been enacted. For the continuity of the state, do not ignore this; you do so to the detriment of the survival of your administration. Given the giant leap in technology, the future is a ramifying e-governance, the type envisaged by Alvin Toffler in his “Twenty-First Century Democracy,” possible due to the transcendence in technology.
Professor Odion-Akhaine teaches at the Lagos State University.
